Vesselwalker: Coronary arteries segmentation using random walks and hessian-based vesselness filter

The segmentation of vascular structures from 2D X-ray angiographies is an important step for vessel measurement, diagnosis and treatment planning. Segmentation of such structures can be challenging due to the vessel appearance and topology. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive method to segment vascular structures by combining Hessian-based vesselness information and the random walk formulation, in which manually selected seed points can be used to refine the segmentation result. The proposed method was tested on coronary arteries angiograms and has shown to be more accurate than an active contour-based method or the Random Walker algorithm, with a mean AUC of 97.2%.